


Quartet

by th_esaurus



Category: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carré
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Casual Sex, Infidelity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-06 05:29:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5404796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"I am going to spend my life with you," Bill announced over breakfast.</i>
</p><p><i>"All right then," Jim said.</i> </p><p>Four stories about two men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quartet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theoldgods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/gifts).



> With thanks to Destro.

**IV.1975**

Bill was dead. That was the fact of it. Thirty-odd years, and Jim had never once imagined his life entirely without Bill.

This, he supposed, was what he had never bothered to comprehend.

Jim lingered on at Thursgood another year or more. He had never been choosy but became even less so in his late middle age, and found the boys a pleasant enough diversion. The staff were in turns admiring and suspicious, but he stolidly acknowledged a natural charm that he had never understood nor cared for, but gave him a certain social immunity. He could be brash and was physically unappealing, his voice military and his spine twisted like the torrid prose of a gothic novel. Still, he commanded a decent amount of respect. That was enough to get by.

He'd thought, not in any great panic but with a mild annoyance, that he'd have to make himself scarce after Smiley's little interview. George was close to nobody left alive and certainly hadn't been any warmer with Jim in the years they shared corridors and colleagues. But he had a reputation for quiet discretion. He had unearthed Jim in his careful excavations, and then left him where he found him.

Nobody came calling, after Smiley.

Jim did, he supposed, have one committed visitor: pudgy little Roach. A shy, myopic boy, he never reminded Jim of his own Bill. Mainly he hovered outside the caravan, awkwardly ornamental, speaking when he was spoken to. Jim had no interest in his studies, and no care whether the boy could sprint a mile or survive a scrum. Only, he had a simple appreciation of idolatry. Like any Englishman with an unironic appreciation of St. George and all he stood for, Jim had spent his youth with stern figures to look up to. His father, foremost, Oxford masters and the lofty, distant dons, tutors and stringers at the Circus; and Bill Haydon, of course. No denying he had always looked up to Bill.

It was less that he had turned out all right, and wanted Roach to do the same. More that he had no other context for his history.

With shocking irregularity, Roach would try to start his own conversations. "Sir—" he said, stopping himself out of embarrassment. If Jim were a less regimented man, he'd have offered the boy use of his name; he had a terrible lisp. Jim considered himself kind enough to encourage the boy with a pause, rather than a bark. "Sir—do you ever think about—the future?"

He asked not with gravitas, but utter terror. Jim knew what he meant.

Had he, as a child – a young, hard-skinned Rhino – considered the vast and unknowable awfulness of life? The yawn of it, indifferent and black, that loomed large after the safety net of school and youth? He was too young to be wondering such things, barely twelve, and such existential angst had not crept upon Jim until he was in his early twenties.

It would have made a mark, too, had he not met Bill.

Bill would often attempt to ply him with liquor nabbed from his father's cellar over Christmas, and was often successful. Or bamboozle him with the latest Marxist follies he'd read about in his student pamphlets, or challenge Jim to a preposterous number of laps around the cricket field. He had ample distraction techniques, when Jim was low and ponderous.

Not least of which--

Bill was skilled with his mouth in more ways than one.

Nonetheless, after his stint in Karla's care, Jim had never quite managed to live beyond the present. The past and future were both escapes not permitted by constant pain. As a young man, he had imagined a future with—

He had long ago hardened his conscious mind. The Circus had started the job, and Moscow Centre had merely seen it finished. But his mind's eye was more tricksy than he wanted to give it credit for, and lulled him – not often, once a month or so – back into Bill's arms. Beige, calm dreams, Bill's coat and hair and cigarettes all brown, the landscape a muddy green through frosted windows. Jim always seemed to take them outside of London, though Bill had loathed the surrounding counties ("What's the bloody point," he would say, "of being _near_ London if you aren't _in_ it?"). Jim, well-travelled by the age of twelve, liked open spaces more than the city.

Anyone could sneak up on you in a city.

They were never frantic in his dreams. Old men past their prime, drinking tea laced thickly with scotch. Books in hands, logs in the fireplace. Bill talking, no doubt, though Jim could never recall what. The same imagined future that had grown up with him throughout his life; grown away from him now. Had abruptly become fantasy instead of hope.

What use of it now? Nothing here to distract him but the dull ache in his bones.

It was curious to think that he had been warned, in a roundabout way, of the folly of Bill Haydon. Of thinking about anything past the here-and-now with Bill.

Jim was angry, in the end, at the trite answer he gave little Roach. Some transparent excuse about the future of his French homework, a blunt cut the boy didn't deserve. He was duly hurt by it, and shuffled off back to his dormitory, and Jim watched his sad, round figure recede into the distance. Just as he had watched Smiley, not quite yet arthritic but out of shape to say the least, padding back across the damp Thursgood grounds all those months ago.

He, too, had needled Jim deeper than he'd meant.

Bill, a traitor, was dead.

No point anymore in imagining the impossible.

**III.1973**

The Downe House grounds had been trodden so flat by the jittery feet of a century of excitable girls that Jim could see Bill's approach from half a mile off. His long stride always seemed languid, but took him at a nippy pace nonetheless. He had a canvas stuffed under one arm – Jim assumed it was a canvas, hastily wrapped in brown paper and string – and was puffing blithely on a thin little cigarillo, his greatcoat billowing out behind him as it struggled to keep up.

It was the first time Jim had seen him since—well, they had not been together in the flesh since his return to the homeland. He half-remembered a telephone call with Bill telling him not to go back to his flat, that it had been turned over, to leave everything in Bill's hands: civilian paperwork, bank accounts, et cetera. He was heading up the investigation, he had said, with a shocking amount of anger in his voice.

Jim was still out of it at the time. His back was constantly aflame. One of the bullets had not gone through, and had lain nestled in his muscle through his prolonged venture in Moscow. They would not get it out now. It rubbed against his bone when he shrugged.

Bill looked in very rude health. A gaggle of little girls in their jogging gear slowed as they passed him, trying to catch his eye. Jim had parked his caravan first of all next to the tennis courts, went through the hassle of finding bricks to brake and level it, until, three days later, the deputy headmistress had told him in a hushed, prudish tone that his current location was inappropriate.

He had not even considered it, and muttered to himself the whole time he clipped the caravan back up to the Alvis and revved it across the grounds to the where it met the edge of the woodlands – out of bounds to the girls, though the cross-country team practiced there weekly so it was a damn moot point regardless.

Jim had not seen Bill since his visit to Bill's flat, a week prior to his flight to Czechoslovakia, to inform him that Control was doolally. Bill had been wildly unsurprised at the time. Most probably they should have talked about it in greater depth, but then Bill had wheedled him into bed.

That was the last time.

Bill had written ahead to announce his arrival. A dog-eared postcard with a grainy photograph of the White House, picked up from a tourist trap in Washington DC. Bill's brief note betrayed the fact he found this amusingly ironic.

_Popping round. Expect me in 2-3w._

Jim had thought about burying the card next to his revolver. He always put it in the ground, in a little burlap sack, next to the front left wheel of his caravan. Every post, every school he went to. Since the tennis courts fiasco, he hadn't had time to dig it up, and the revolver was lying under a freshly moved patch of earth, freely exposed to the elements and a dozen-score curious girls. He would have to deal with it soon.

He put the card in a manila folder that he kept behind a loose chipboard panel under the sink. Jim had once been a believer in hiding things in plain sight - put a few marked essays, sarcastic comments in red biro scribbled across the top, and no-one would be any the wiser. But he had become paranoid since his return to England. All the folder contained was a few letters and polaroids from Bill, his coded notice of discharge from the Circus, and an old, typewritten letter from Bill's one-time hero, Fanshawe, whom Jim had met only twice in his life. He kept it in the thick ivory envelope it was delivered in, and he had not re-read it for more than a decade. Consequently, it was still in good nick. The scribbles from Bill, varying shades of decaying yellow, were more often exposed.

Jim's door was ajar, and Bill did not knock.

"I brought you a daub," he announced, muffled by his cigarillo and annoyed by the fact. He had a bottle of scotch in his deep coat pocket, with an off-license price sticker still on its neck, and he set it down on the beige countertop and used its screw-top as an ashtray. The room smelled instantly of blown-out candles, and of Bill's cologne. He had not bothered to update it in seven years or so. "To make your little nook more homely."

He must've had Jim watched. Casually, of course.

"How's your back?" Bill asked gently. It was the sort of tone that reminded Jim of private nights in Bill's grand dorm room at Oxford. His father's money and a four-poster bed.

"Hell," Jim replied shortly.

The way Bill kissed was always so unbearably casual. As though he had all the time in the world and none of its cares. Jim stood stiffly for a moment and let Bill's lips warm his own. The beige curtains of the caravan were open, but the day was frosty, the glass pane condensed. The grounds outside were a murky fog; brown and green on one side and whitish on the other.

He opened his mouth to Bill with a low sigh.

Bill had always been the more romantic of the two of them. Not sentimental as such, but prone to poetic outbursts, an unquenchable creative streak that evenings in the little painting studio on the lower ground floor of his flat did not always satisfy. Jim had watched him paint once or twice in the old days, and he volleyed between wild flourishes with a stubby brush and periods of intense calm, staring almost through the canvas, chewing on the end of his pipe. All at once he would tire of the thing, though, and ask Jim abruptly where he wanted to go for dinner.

Fan, in the letter that Jim still kept, called Bill _flighty._

"Your bed is entirely to small to fuck in," Bill complained. It was surely true, though Jim hadn't had opportunity to test the theory.

"Christ," Jim muttered. He had the urgent feeling that they needed to discuss other matters before they got lost in each other.

Jim couldn't lie easily: a stringer, not a diplomat. Better at wetwork than words. He couldn't tell Bill that the thought of lying in his arms again had got him through weeks of state-sanctioned torture, because he hadn't been able to think of anyone, anything at all. Only how much he wanted it all to end.

They didn't fall into bed immediately. Bill had laid those cards on the table now; it was an inevitability. Bill took for granted that Jim would always wait for him, no matter how long a stretch they went without each other, and Jim was only half the time angry at himself for doing it. They hadn't been regular since, Christ, their thirties. It seemed an age ago.

Bill poured a drink for them both and informed him casually that Control was dead. "Who?" Jim asked sharply, but Bill shook his head, taking a sip and making a strained face.

"He did it to himself, in the end. Illness or stress or whatnot. Alleline gave him the boot a few months before. He was dead to the Circus already."

"Alleline took charge? Not Smiley?"

"They swept the floor after Control went off the rails. George, Connie, half the old guard."

Jim nodded slowly. "Who's my heir, then?"

Bill made his sour face again., though milder this time. "Guillam. That peacock."

"Running for you?"

"There was quite the reshuffle, after all the mess," Bill said blithely. As though Jim hadn't been lying in the middle of it in a pool of his own blood. "I'm little more than a figurehead these days."

He took another sip of his scotch.

And then Bill glanced over the rim of the glass at Jim's expression. Just briefly. Measured and slow, not a sudden, noticeable movement.

Jim had always considered Control's insinuation that there was a mole at the top of the Circus to be utterly maniacal. And yet, he had dug himself shallow cover and gone out to Czecho nonetheless.

"Why are you here, Bill?" Jim said, suddenly exhausted. His muscles had been tense since he saw Bill striding up the sodden grounds, and the wound in his back was likely seeping. He couldn't always tell right away. Mistook it sometime for the back-of-the-neck prickle of being watched.

He put a clean kettle under the tap until it spat out a little water, swore at four broken matches until one didn't snap in his hands, lit the gas hob. For a second, when he put the kettle over the fire, he caught an open glimpse of Bill's expression, reflected in the flickering steel, and he looked older than Jim had ever seen him. He had a cold in his eyes that reminded Jim abruptly of Russia, of his cell, grey and brown, the concrete texture of his skin, marked long ago and unwilling to change despite the passing years. Protected by some outer wall Jim never saw. He had been hooded when they brought him in.

His shoulder-blade was dribbling where the second Russian bullet had sliced through him, sticking his vest to his back. 

"I'm out of the game," he said, and by the time he turned to Bill, the expression was gone. They were back in miserable Thatcham, and Bill had the gall to look offended.

"Christ, Jim. I wanted to see you," he said.

It sounded so genuine.

Bill got down on his knees, loud and complaining, and took Jim's cock in his mouth while the kettle whistled hysterically.

**II.1950**

Bill Haydon's thirty-third birthday came and went with the usual furore. He rented out a vaguely seedy hall in Dalston, sweet-talked one of his old girls into stringing the dirty arch windows with shop-bought bunting and Christmas lights. Some blood pact was sworn with the little Indian who ran the off-license two streets down from his flat, and beer, whisky and punch flowed freely all evening.

Jim had been over while he was whittling down his invite list, lying on the bed in his boxers while Bill sat scratching with a fountain pen at his desk, cursing around his cigarillo. "I'll just put a bloody ad in the bloody newspaper," he said tetchily, "Let the plebs and the bourgeoisie mingle in my honour."

"Roll up, roll up," Jim muttered, amused.

"If it's all Circus bores who show up," Bill said, stubbing out his smoke and flopping on the bed beside Jim, "I'll hang myself."

They were sleeping together with unusual regularity at the time. Bill had fallen out with his current fling, Patricia, after she had threatened Bill she would get pregnant by any means necessary. "It's the damned hassle of it," he had complained, sozzled and slouching on Jim's grey armchair. "I'd give her the money to keep it out of my sight, but she can be relentless."

"I thought it's why you liked her," Jim commented. All his furniture was stiff and barely worn in, and Bill's legs spread particularly wide when he slumped.

"Obviously," Bill scoffed. "Better safe than sorry."

He had broken it off with Patricia by telephone from the office, and the gossipy mothers made sure half the Circus knew it by the end of the day. There was then the usual period of grace, where Bill loudly enjoyed his bachelordom; and then he invited himself over to Jim's for dinner and didn't leave for a week. Eventually he derided Jim's beige walls and carpets as unspeakably drab, took a long bath, and left.

They alternated, after that.

"Are you bullying Fanshawe into coming?" Jim asked, as Bill, bored of the conversation, pressed his lips against Jim's neck. He was quite stubbled by this point, and Bill's tongue on his neck felt like a cat's.

"Fan?" Bill's brow furrowed, as though he should be annoyed at the name, and then quickly smoothed out. "He must be a hundred by now. Perhaps I should ask him. He did always like to be surrounded by squalid youth."

"Are we still classed as young?"

"You were always an old soul," Bill demurred, and rolled on top of Jim. He was getting a little pot-bellied where his fieldwork was giving way to the desk jockey life. Constant schmoozing on the telephone, smoothing over cracks and creases in newly minted networks, throwing old meat around to distract the sniffer dogs.

Jim was still lean as an athlete. He spent six months every year running across Europe. Sometimes at his own pace, and other times—

Jim did not attend the party itself. He caught up with Roy Bland over an ale some weeks later, and was told the story by way of Roy's bitter idioms: Bill had made an ass of himself. Too drunk, too uncouth, too many of his lovers under one roof. Patricia had been barred from entry by some Hungarian strong-arm, and had kicked up a hell of a fuss while the guests were still arriving. George Smiley's new fiancée had some distant relation to Bill and had come out of solidarity; had to stand there with his shoulder trapped under Bill's arm while Bill flirted brazenly with the poor girl; Ann, her name was, Bland said. Handsy with a few young boys, was Bill, Bland stated darkly.

Bill had roared his name out a couple of times, Bland said, well into his third ale. Jim, not a bit drunk, murmured noncommittally. "Staggering around the hall turning anyone with ten pounds of muscle on them, looking for you," Bland scoffed, ashamed for Bill. " _Jim,_ he says, _I must have Jim!_ Of course, Smiley tells him you're on holiday in the Algarve. Couldn't think of a better bloody excuse."

Jim had been investigating a leak in one of Bill's younger South African networks. It had always been considered idiotic to headhunt during socio-political turmoil, but Bill swore hand over his heart that it was a worthwhile excursion. His handpicked agency hadn't yet uncovered gold, but handfuls of diamonds can be worth just as much. Drug-runners, Bill found, were excellent sources as long as no-one ever asked them to tattle on their own kin. "Never condescend to the networks," Bill always said, "And they'll respect you for it."

It was not a rule he stuck to in his home life.

The leak Jim was sent in to patch up turned out to be a geyser, and he was caught in a petty firefight seventy miles north-east of Cape Town with not a sniff of backup. He caught a bad fistful of shrapnel and splinters when a munitions crate he used as cover took heavy fire; did not explode but tore up badly, spat wood and sparks up and down his left calf. He ended up with late cover from the majority of the network, still loyal to Bill and recognising him as an out of water Englishman.

Four men died; three rotten eggs and one good one.

Jim was laid up in a hospital shack with no outside contact for two days while women picked shards out of his knee with tweezers. He had a sweating code man waiting for him in Cape Town who sent word to the Circus that he'd missed his initial rendezvous and both fallbacks.

This would have been the day before Bill's birthday.

The shootout was barely reported, and then only as heroin business. Nothing of state concern. Jim used his regular workname, Ellis, on the flight home, his leg wrapped up in bandages to stop the pinprick bleeding. It looked worse than it was.

"Too bad I missed all the fun," Jim said to Bland, a little more matronly than he'd meant to sound.

Bland shrugged, drank half his pint in a few gulps. "Bill's Bill. He smoothed everything over in the office, if not with all his girls. Laughs easily at himself, makes everyone feel comfortable. Damn Haydon. He's got a knack."

Bland didn't clarify what for.

They had given Jim a rough debrief at Sarratt; an old doctor with calloused hands had examined his leg and told him he was both fine and ruddy lucky. Bill was hauled in for a shakedown, too. He was on the up and up within the Circus, plenty of people to coo over his way of charming would-be defectors on the borders of the Commonwealth. Jim was well known to have Bill's back, and therefore Jim's cock-ups went straight back to Bill.

They likely gave him a dressing down about the quality of his product. The product was just fine; the sources were just occasionally unreliable.

Bill didn't mention it on the drive home. They went together, the first time they had been alone since before Bill's party. He was aggressively jovial, crowing about Jim's new set of wheels, a second-hand Alvis he'd picked up at a car show, and haggled down to a song. Bill adored the beast, called it the best car ever made in England, and therefore the best car full stop.

Jim was quiet. His leg ached something awful, like pins and needles after a long, dreary stakeout. He watched the road mostly, and sometimes looked at Bill. He didn't seem to have aged in the past ten years, no more rustic and grey than he had been at Oxford. The top button of his collar roguishly unbuttoned; he hated to think people might mistake him for a banker. No one ever could, not in his corduroy brown suits, with his hair uncombed, and his smile wily and willing. Bill, in his heart, was conservative and judgmental, but he loathed the same qualities in others.

As they neared Bill's flat, he grabbed at Jim's bad leg, not hard but with an unusual urgency. Jim drove on home. His leg throbbed. Bill became quiet, rolled down the window, and lit a cigarette.

It was another half hour through the late evening traffic, and the only words Bill offered on the way was a sudden announcement that Fan was dead.

"Old Fan?"

"Quite dead. Months ago. Nobody bothered to tell me, the little shits. He willed everything – or what was left – to a twenty-something boy he barely knew." Bill smoked his cigarette viciously. 

Jim knew that Bill had nothing left in his messy estate that belonged to his once-beloved mentor. He had burned all the letters and poems once in a fit of pique, when he was younger and could not control that jealous streak. Fan had gifted him a first edition hardback of some notable Classics tome that Jim had skimmed once upon a time and found incredibly dry; Bill took it, with an air of great smugness, to a second-hand bookshop in Cheapside and left it there.

Jim still had a letter of Fan's in his possession. It was addressed to him, and Bill had never read it. He thought about mentioning it. But then they were pulling up at his redbrick flat, and Bill was getting out of the car, and the moment was gone.

"I wish you had wired me from Cape Town," Bill said irritably as they walked up to the front door. Jim was still limping a little.

"Personally?" Jim scoffed. "Hardly protocol." The pain made his words rough and clipped.

"I don't give a damn," Bill snapped. "I didn't know where the fucking hell you were."

Jim knew, as most of Bill's acquaintances did, that he was easy for a pretty boy. As long as they kept their mouths shut and their trousers open, Bill was more than happy to let them hang publicly on his arm. Jim had caught gossip more than once, from both the Circus mothers and an exceedingly prudish Esterhase, that Bill had been seen, brazen, on his own doorstep, with his lips to the ear or neck or mouth of a boy barely out of school.

Bill never once kissed Jim anywhere except indoors. Not that Jim ever pressed him on it. But Bill was always—

Careful, with Jim, in a way he couldn't be bothered to be with anyone else.

They kissed as soon as the door was closed. It usually took Bill a good half hour to build up from languidly casual to something more heated, but he seemed greedier tonight, his hands slipping under Jim's coat to skim at the skin just above his waistband. Jim was taller, bulkier, but Bill crowded him against the back of the door, both of them leaning their weight on it, and mouthed at his jaw and lips.

Jim was weary from the telling-off at Sarratt, from his hospital stint, from his flight and his leg and the gunfight that Bill still hadn't asked him about. "Kiss me," Bill muttered, his breath warm against Jim's bottom lip. "Please, Jim."

The bed was too firm and too cold from being empty so long. It was a double, but barely, and Bill pulled Jim down with him, wrapping them both in the thin blankets and each other's limbs. Bill still kissed like he had as a young man, eager with his tongue but not entirely selfish, his palm finding Jim's cock over his trousers and soothing it steadily. They paused a moment to undress slowly, and Jim fetched two more blankets, and Bill watched him limp back to the bed with a worried fondness on his face.

"I would follow you anywhere," he said, not entirely at ease. It was a shocking thing to say. "Though I rather doubt you would do the same for me."

Jim bristled at that. "Jesus, Bill. You know I let you get away with anything."

"You're very sweet to me," Bill agreed.

"I don't—while you're off with your—" Jim cut himself short. They had both agreed, after the war, that in their line of work these sort of flabby emotions would never do. Still, Jim always waited for Bill. Turned down his casual offers to buy him a boy or two while he was off scouting in America. If Bill assumed he had some other piece on the side, then that was fine.

He didn't, and never had.

"You're very sweet to me," Bill muttered again, sounding almost angry. He rolled over and buried his head in the pillow and asked Jim petulantly to see to him.

"My leg," Jim muttered.

"Damn it all," Bill replied.

He wrapped all the blankets around his shoulders, which made him look smaller than he really was, his hair tousled and his cheeks pink from the cold and the kissing. Then he clambered on top of Jim's hips, spat onto his fingers, worked himself a little until Jim took over. Two fingers inside him, Bill couldn't help complaining his hands were like sandpaper. They weren't young anymore, and, like poor, dead Fan, Bill was getting used to his dalliances being young and eager.

Jim was tired.

Bill eased back and down, hissing. He used to ride Jim like this often, between lectures. Between wars. Back when Jim had let himself imagine it could always be like this.

Bill's Bill, Bland would tell him a week later, over a few too many pints. It was a statement Jim would, at no point in his life, try to argue with.

**I.1938**

On the morning of November eighth, sometime around three am, on a tipsy stroll back from an unironically Conservative gentleman's club, where their youth and vocal debate had got them impolitely removed, Bill Hadyon pulled Jim into a shadowy Oxford alcove. There, in a strained voice, Bill asked him if he liked the novels of Oscar Wilde, and then kissed him wetly on the mouth.

"I'm neither here nor there about him," Jim replied, after a beat. The early morning was chill, sparkling with frost that would turn to dew by the morning, and Bill's breath was warm on his chin. They kissed again, and Bill put his hand on Jim's waist, untucking his starched shirt.

"I had this rather suave speech planned," Bill told him, some hours later, carding his fingers through Jim's hair as they lay on his bed. Bill's father's money had earned him a private room, and though Bill thrived on company, he said to Jim dryly that he preferred his less legal proclivities to occur outside of shared space. "I was going to drop a string of tragic, literary homosexuals into our casual conversation and see how many references it took before you twigged. Fan and I had a bet on it."

Bill rolled over so they were face to face. He was, as Jim had decided from the off, a great beauty. Pale skin, his hair falling about in auburn curls, his fingernails trimmed, his voice more sagely than anything he ever talked about. "I want to kiss you constantly and desperately," Bill said to him.

"Well then," Jim agreed.

Jim had arrived at Oxford with few expectations resting on his broad shoulders. He supposed he would enjoy the athletics, might take up rowing, but only if it didn't interfere with his rugby. He thought he would like the library. He had seen black and white pictures in a pamphlet his mother showed him. He was an amiable young man, but left no friends behind when he moved to back to England. He had knocked around with a few continental boys, but not in the sort of encounters where one promises to write letters or stay in touch.

Suffice to say, he knew he didn't care for girls and that was that. There was not exactly a plethora of those on campus, and it would be nice, he thought, not to have to keep up the pretense; he had hated to laugh along with the leers and wolf-whistles, and was considered odd and distant for it.

He threw himself into his running.

At the very least, he was fiercely fond of England. Oxford was a good opportunity, on the whole, in his general opinion.

" _Well_ then," Bill said back, almost mocking, and then he kissed Jim like he could do nothing else.

He wasn't coy about it. Liked to get his tongue between Jim's lips, thick and warm, languid kisses and soft moans. Jim was not used to this unhurried sort of lounging, and found it best to lie back with Bill's weight on top of him and let Bill have his way with Jim's mouth however he liked. Jim's hand rested in the small of Bill's back.

After a little while, they undressed. Jim slept with Bill in his arms, and woke later with Bill's fingers at his lips, a gentle tingling.

"I am going to spend my life with you," Bill announced over breakfast.

"All right then," Jim said.

Jim, having never much had a life of his own, slipped easily into Bill's. He drank more than he used to, took up smoking for a term and then dropped it, ran early in the morning while Bill slept in, joined a young Conservatives society, took the train to London with Bill to take in the new exhibitions every third Saturday.

Bill's friends were all forgettable types, save for his old master Fanshawe, whom Bill professed a wild adoration for and said he strove to emulate in all facets of life. "He has wonderful secrets," Bill said blithely, and Jim assumed he meant the fact that Fan was exclusively homosexual, though that wasn't particularly hush-hush.

Jim had, later, in his possession, a neatly typed letter from Fan, signed with his full, illustrious name in ebony ink. The entire letter was somewhat groveling in tone; Bill had brought Jim along, with some of his more licentious compatriots, to a soiree at Fan's, where the old man had apparently made a pass at Jim.

Jim hadn't particularly noticed. Bill had been livid. He had marched Jim back to his dorm, ranting all the way about traitors and follies and fools, and then he had got drunk in record time and kissed Jim with his whiskey-burnt mouth. "It was no skin off my back," Jim said mildly. Fan had put his hand on Jim's knee, no more than that.

"I always have to be outraged on your behalf," Bill muttered miserably, and pushed Jim into his armchair, and stayed awake long enough to suck him off.

They both had lectures at eight.

Jim would have forgotten the whole incident if not for Fan's letter. He skimmed it over breakfast, ended up with flecks of egg yolk on one corner thanks to a hard shove from an overeager boy who apologised four times when he noticed Jim's size. It was all very literary. Fan had been an English master in a former life, Bill told him. Comparisons of Jim and Bill to unpollinated figs, Fan presumably as the dastardly wasp, which Jim found pretty distasteful. 

But there was a paragraph that made Jim frown deeply. He read and re-read it carefully. Then he folded the letter and slipped it into his blazer pocket and took it back to his room and read it again, his long legs folded under him on the wooden floor.

_You must understand, my dear boy, that Bill is a magpie. Any pretty glint, no matter the sex, will catch his eye, and his impetus to chase is unrelenting. Men like you and I – you will forgive my impertinence, I hope? – can do no more but turn this way and that and hope to reflect a little light in his direction._

_His passions are flighty, you see. Not merely in the carnal sense, but his entire attitude. One day he will declare the Greeks to have been the most advanced and admirable society ever to have lived; the next, it is the Orientals he fawns over, their art and politics; he has said to me on several encounters that the modern Russian man's outlook is the only one he can truly admire. He means to study law one week, fine art the next, mathematics the next after that. His head turns this way and that, a compass following an ever-wandering north._

_I am sure, of course, that none of this is unfamiliar to you. Our Bill is easy to read, though I suspect he is becoming frustrated with that openness of his. Cherish it while you can, my dear._

The old man, here, veered away from his digression and got back on track with begging Jim's forgiveness for his lecherous ways.

What Jim took offense with was the implication that Bill was anything less than upright. He was a young man, allowed his whims, but he knew what to hold onto and what to let fall by the wayside. Queen and country. His education. A modicum of sense about money. Jim, maybe. Jim liked to think he was a keeper.

It was around this time that Jim began to dream of Bill. He took it in his stride. He was a pragmatic young man, and knew he could do little to steer his unconscious mind; besides, he spent most of his waking life in Bill's company – why should he dream of anyone else?

He'd never thought that much about the future, that he was aware of. His present flung him from one place to the next, barely time to settle. Already there were murmurings of war on the horizon, and Jim suspect his days of academia were limited. But his dreams were calm and stolid, repetitive, as though a layer of dust had settled upon them. He and Bill, together. That was the motif. Always, they seemed, a little older than now, a little hardened, though Bill still pretty in the angular way boys can be. There was no particular aim to them, in the dreams, no task they had to complete nor problem to solve. Just content in one another's company.

Once, when Jim had been urged to drink too much, and Bill was quite sozzled, he told him. "I dream of you," he said, his hand bold on Bill's waist, on the pretence of keeping him upright as they braved the cobbled streets. "That we're—together, for a very long time."

"A prophet!" Bill crowed, far too loudly. "A magician!"

"Pipe down."

"I shan't, I mustn't. I'm in the company of an omniscient. We shall always be together, my dearest Jim," Bill said, his lips dangerously close to Jim's neck.

"If you say so," Jim agreed mildly, and hefted Bill against his hip, and half carried him home. They fell into bed, did not fuck, but kissed tenderly a while, the old booze making their mouths too sour for tongues and teeth. Bill was a little slighter than Jim, and curled into his chest, snoring, with his pink mouth open. In Jim's heady state, Bill seemed to him so alive. A man with so much future open to him, the rise of his chest and the snuffles of his breath absolute proof of life. The only signs of imperfection his whiskey breath and his late night stubble.

He seemed immortal, constant and youthful, a man who could change the world even as he was unchanged by it. Jim, though he was neither greatly religious nor prone to fits of hyperbole, felt a little blessed by Bill's affection.

Bill would not remember their brief conversation later. Jim didn't care to remind him. He'd only said his piece because he was drunk. He did not consider himself romantic, and the dreams were torridly soppy.

He assumed he would grow out of it, eventually, as older, wiser men claimed boys of his inclination always did.

He assumed he would grow out of it, even if he rather hoped he would never grow out of Bill Haydon.


End file.
